Sunday, October 07, 2012

Stats & Students

Among the many annoyances delivered by Blogger's new interface or whatever it is, there are these numbers that keep showing up by my posts. I thought they were comments at first, but I finally figured out tonight that they are page view counts. Here's a screen shot of my PBW posts dashboard, which shows my Flea Market Ten post (and you can click on the image to see a larger version):

Now, according to Blogger the post has had 197 page views. The odd thing is that my Flickr account, which hosts the little slideshow I put in the post, also tracks how many times it's been viewed, which as of this moment is 2,112 times.

Whenever I post images on Flickr but don't link or embed them anywhere else I get zero traffic, so I feel certain that the 2,112 views had to come from visitors to the blog. Perhaps they used one of those feed things people employ to read blogs that maybe Blogger can't track, but I'm really not sure. Anyway, I thought I'd mention this for those of you on Blogger who are taking those page view stats as accurate -- I don't think they are.

One more recent development I should probably mention: certain writing-related posts here at PBW are now being assigned to university students for reference and study (Darlene, stop laughing.) Since we already have plenty of visitors who are students this shouldn't be a problem, but I thought my regulars should know in the event they start asking a lot of questions in comments (which I will handle, but you all are welcome to join in with any help you want to offer.)

8 comments:

As I understand the page view thing on Blogger--and I could be wrong--the page views are visitors who have come through a different link. If I put a link here (your site), and one of your readers uses it to read my blog, that would give me one page view; if your reader found me on their own, no page view.

I have recently started writing a poem or short story on this one particular site; suddenly I started getting all these page views on my blog that I'd never had before. Tracked them back to the poetry site where folks had linked from that site to mine.

I don't really get the Blogger reason for the page view count. Why don't the numbers just reflect any and all who come to one's site? Some kind of marketing tool perhaps?

Also, remember,if it's a new post, people are probably reading it from the home page, so your home page will get the page view count rising. Unless people actually click through to read the post on it's own page, or via a link from someone else, etc, then the page view count of that particular post will not rise. Does that make sense?

I think the assigned posts thing is great! I'm looking forward to a slew of interesting questions that I can probably learn from too :)

As to the Blogger views, I debated going with Blogger with my site but when I had to change hosts, but that was right about the time they, in their unfortunately infinite wisdom *cue sarcasm,* were starting to "improve" things. So, I chose a different host and Wordpress. It's just easier. And I don't need things deciphered every time I check my dashboard.

I would give up Blogger in a heartbeat -- I would never have signed on with them if I'd known Evan Williams would be selling the company to Google -- but I have to first learn something else. I've set up a private blog on Wordpress as practice, but that's turning out to be a nightmare. So (for now, anyway) I'm stuck here.